Drone related calls (11601_18)

Request

For the period 1st April 2018 to 30th June 2018 can you please tell me how many drone/UAV related calls have been received by West Midlands Police, with a breakdown of the nature of the incident, any action taken, and the month the call was received.

Response

Please find attached our response.

In addition to the attached, West Midlands Police will neither confirm nor deny that we hold any further information relevant to your request. This email serves as a Refusal Notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act).

REASONS FOR DECISION

The Freedom of Information Act places two responsibilities on public authorities, the first of which is to confirm what information it holds and secondly to then disclose that information, unless exemptions apply.

In this case West Midlands Police will neither confirm nor deny the existence of any further relevant incidents by virtue of:

Section 30(3) Investigations and proceedings conducted by the public authority

In line with the above, I am required to complete a Prejudice Test/Public Interest Test (PIT) on disclosure. Please find this PIT attached.

No inference can be taken from this refusal that the information you have requested does or does not exist.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.